Summary:An angry, grieving seventeen-year-old musician facing expulsion from her prestigious Brooklyn private school travels to Paris to complete a school assignment and uncovers a diary written during the French revolution by a young actress attempting to help a tortured, imprisoned little boy--Louis Charles, the lost king of France.

School Library Journal - 09/01/2010 Gr 9 Up—Andi Alpers's younger brother died two years ago and his death has torn her family apart. She's on antidepressants and is about to flunk out of her prep school. Her mother spends all day painting portraits of her lost son and her father has all but disappeared, focusing on his Nobel Prize-winning genetics work. He reappears suddenly at the beginning of winter break to institutionalize his wife and whisk Andi off to Paris with him. There he will be conducting genetic tests on a heart rumored to belong to the last dauphin of France. He hopes that Andi will be able to put in some serious work on her senior thesis regarding mysterious 18th-century guitarist Amadé Malherbeau. In Paris, Andi finds a lost diary of Alexandrine Paradis, companion to the dauphin, and meets Virgil, a hot Tunisian-French world-beat hip-hop artist. Donnelly's story of Andi's present life with her intriguing research and growing connection to Virgil overshadowed by depression is layered with Alexandrine's quest, first to advance herself and later to somehow save the prince from the terrors of the French Revolution. While teens may search in vain for the music of the apparently fictional Malherbeau, many will have their interest piqued by the connections Donnelly makes between classical musicians and modern artists from Led Zeppelin to Radiohead. Revolution is a sumptuous feast of a novel, rich in mood, character, and emotion. With multiple hooks, it should appeal to a wide range of readers.—Eric Norton, McMillan Memorial Library, Wisconsin Rapids, WI - Copyright 2010 Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and/or School Library Journal used with permission.

Booklist - 10/01/2010 Donnelly follows her Printz Honor Book, A Northern Light (2003), with another gripping, sophisticated story, but this time she pairs historical fiction with a wrenching contemporary plotline. After her little brother’s murder and her mother’s subsequent breakdown, high-school-senior Andi feels like a ghost. She is furious at her father, a Nobel Prize–winning scientist with a 25-year-old pregnant girlfriend, when he arranges for Andi to join him in Paris: “Sure. My brother’s dead. My mother’s insane. Hey, let’s have a crepe.” In France though, Andi, a passionate musician, discovers a diary written during the French Revolution by a young woman with whom Andi develops an increasing fascination. Donnelly links past and present with distracting contrivances—culminating in time travel—that work against the novel’s great strengths. But the ambitious story, narrated in Andi’s grief-soaked, sardonic voice, will wholly capture patient readers with its sharply articulated, raw emotions and insights into science and art; ambition and love; history’s ever-present influence; and music’s immediate, astonishing power: “It gets inside of you . . . and changes the beat of your heart.” - Copyright 2010 Booklist.

Bulletin for the Center... - 11/01/2010 Andi’s depression over her younger brother Truman’s death is deepening with time rather than waning, barely held in check by strong antidepressants and relieved only when she plays guitar until her fingers bleed. When her estranged, Nobel prize-winning father returns to find the family in shambles, he quickly dispatches her mother to a psychiatric hospital and insists that Andi accompany him to Paris over winter break, where he will be genetically testing a heart believed to belong to Louis-Charles, the boy dauphin imprisoned and abused until his early death following the French Revolution. While in Paris, Andi finds the diary of Alexandrine Paradis, the dauphin’s companion, hidden in an eighteenth-century guitar case. As Andi reads Alex’s first-hand account of the revolution, she identifies with Alex’s love for Louis-Charles and her guilt about the role she inadvertently played in the fate of the doomed prince; their relationship becomes inextricably woven into Andi’s grief narrative to the point where she enters into their world to complete Alex’s quest to reach out to the lost boy, a quest that facilitates her own grief work over Truman. Every detail is meticulously inscribed into a multi-layered narrative that is as wise, honest, and moving as it is cunningly worked. Andi and Alex are flawed artists, creatures of their time but also timeless in their self-absorption and aching need for forgiveness and redemption. The interplay between the contemporary and the historical is seamless in both plot and theme, and the storytelling grips hard and doesn’t let go. Readers fascinated with French history, the power of music, and/or contemporary realist fiction will find this brilliantly crafted work utterly absorbing. KC - Copyright 2010 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.